Is there a debt you would like to repay? (Published March 14, 2021)

 KGUA Writer’s, Episode #46 – Is there a debt you would like to repay? As many from the Mendonoma Coast know by now, I found out a couple years back that I was adopted at birth. My adopted parents never told me, and I never suspected it, and never had a reason to doubt they were my biological parents. It was quite a revelation to say the least. I was an only child, and quite a spoiled one at that. Looking back over old family slides that I am just now converting into digital images; I see I was showered with gifts from an early age. I was in YMCA, Cub Scouts, and Little League. I had piano lessons, golf lessons, swim lessons, dance lessons, to just name a few. I went fishing with my dad, golf with my mom and dad, and camping trips to National Parks all over the US and Canada. We went to professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey games. I was at the LA Coliseum for the Dodger - Yankee first exhibition game in Los Angeles here they honored Roy Campanella and over 100,000 in attendance were given candles to light and the stadium lights were turned off. I sure that will never happen again. We were at Dodger Stadium when Don Drysdale set the record of 58 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings, but not without controversy I may add. Most memorable was a father-son trip across the Southern United States when I was an early Teen. I remember my dad telling me, “son, in a couple year’s you’ll not want to do this with your old man”. He was probably right on that. I was so much a part of my large extended family. All holidays were spent with uncles, aunts, and cousins. I spent much of my young childhood with my grandma. We played so much bingo that my grandma’s parakeet named Skippy once repeated after me, “B-9.” There were giant family reunions every year. Sort of ironic, my aunt got me interested in genealogy at an early age and I helped find information about one side of my dad’s family. My parents, neither of them college educated, were always pushing me to succeed. So much so as a teen that it drove me crazy. Not that being a truck driver is bad, but every time I got a “C” in a class, I can still hear my mom screaming, “unless you apply yourself in school, you’ll be nothing but a truck driver when you grow up”. Well, I did go to college and then onto graduate school. My parents paid for college, at least as an undergraduate, and gave me my own apartment to boot. My parents went on to give us money for the down payment on our house. And when my dad died, his will enabled us to have the money for our down payment for our house here on the Mendocino Coast. It is very,very easy for me to answer this week’s prompt, “Is There a Debt You Would Like to Repay?” Need I write more?

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